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CPUs run hot. So hot that they would destroy themselves if it weren't for

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built-in protections that slow them down. But we don't want to slow down. We

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want to go fast. And thus nerds are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to

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keep their CPUs cool. But what if there's a whole other side of cooling

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that no one's talking about? The backside. Why not put a cooler there as

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well? So we did. Before you furiously comment saying, "Cooling a CPU from the

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back doesn't work. There's too many layers of stuff between the CPU and the

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cooler for it to be effective." Well, take a look at this footage. That is

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heat on the back of the motherboard. And there's enough that removing it might

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actually make a meaningful difference. So, does it? And if it does, is it easy

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or cheap to do? Well, that depends.

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The simplest way to cool your CPU from both sides is to just point a fan at the

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back of it. And that's been done before. My first PC case was the Anttech 3002,

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which had a mount for a fan right behind the motherboard tray. Did I spend 30 of

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my high school dollars on an Noctua fan to put it there? Yes. Did it do

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anything? from what I remember kind of. So, first things first, let's see if

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Antech was cooking or not. Noctua has this handy magnetic mount from uh their

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desk fan that we're just going to use just as a quick little preliminary test

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here. We're seeing about a degree or two

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difference uh going from like 51 something to more closer to 50 49.7 kind

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of area. And that lines up with the preliminary testing that we did taking

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measurements from the CPU and hardware info. But we all know that proper

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cooling requires contact. So, let's see how easy or hard it is to mount a cooler

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on the back here. First things first, any mounting design that we make, we'll

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need to make sure that the CPU cooler on the front isn't affected because,

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spoiler alert, it's doing most of the work. And mounting hardware for CPUs is

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made with relatively tight tolerances to ensure that you can get even contact

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across the CPU's integrated heat spreader. And pretty much every part of

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the mounting hardware plays an important role, including the parts that go on the

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back of the motherboard, which are in our way. Let's get rid of it.

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And you know what else is in our way? The Intel socket back plate that holds

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the CPU retention arm on the front. And that also prevents our second cooler

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from making direct contact with the back of the motherboard. So, not only can we

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not get away with using out ofthe-box CPU cooling parts for this, we're going

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to have to remove the back plate as well, which means that we're going to

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need to make a custom back plate. Yes.

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Originally, what I was thinking of doing is we could probably just modify the

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original back plate to add the cooler

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onto the back. However, as you can notice, there isn't really a whole lot

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of material on the ends to put the bolt holes through. I'd basically be drilling

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right along the edge here. So, we're going to have to make a new one out of

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metal.

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Well, that's one thing I noticed. Oh, is that going to be a problem? They

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probably put this so there's a small thin layer

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insulation layer to probably make sure just in case that

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none of these traces or contacts. Oh yeah, cuz there's definitely open VAS

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there.

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So, we plain just won't be able to get the same degree of contact on the back

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as we have on the front. First of all, uh we're on the the wrong side, but

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second of all, this is not a flat surface like the cold plate on your cooler or the IHS on your CPU. There's a

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bunch of tiny electrical components that are going to prevent this cold plate

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from sitting flush with the back of the motherboard. What are we going to do about that? Well, we're going to need a

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cushioning layer that's a lot thicker than your typical thermal paste, like

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this 1 mm pad.

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Sadly, it has a worse thermal conductivity than any thermal paste. But

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hey, it's much better than air, which is what the fan's working with. So, I'm

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just going to estimate it because like it's just got to be good enough, you

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know? That's what I always say. It's just got to be good enough. We decided

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to go with a mechanism that's just mounting into these corners that are already part of the Intel bracket

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because it just makes our lives easier to mount in here. We had to make some

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custom length screws because I don't

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even actually know exactly what these holes are for on the Noctua coolers cuz

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I've never used them. I'm assuming it's compatibility with much older hardware.

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Uh but I've never actually had to use them. So now I do and it's a what an

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exciting time for me, a new experience. Thankfully there's Robertson screws in

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the precision screwdriver kit which has an adapter that lets you lose any of

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those precision bits with the LTD screwdriver. Technically, the length of

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these screws should mean that nothing actually will screw into the

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motherboard, but there is a chance that like things can bow and bend a little

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bit. So, I am going to be careful. I'm

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kind of trying to stop when I feel resistance out of just sheer terror

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because I am legitimately worried about this board existing. So, let's

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let's boot. If this seems simple, it's because Justin did all of the hard work.

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Honestly, I mean, looking at it right now, we're still looking fine. It's not

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better. It's not worse. This is kind of

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interesting. So, when we're looking through the thermal camera, we can see that our front CPU cooler is just much,

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much warmer overall than our back CPU

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cooler, which implies that it's moving away a lot more heat to be expected. But

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honestly, it feels like we haven't done much because the base of our CPU cooler

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is 20°. So, I don't think it's it's

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doing much at all. So, why doesn't the cooler perform better? Well, the

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motherboard is acting as an insulator, which slows the rate of heat transfer.

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And it doesn't matter how thermally conductive our CPU cooler or our thermal pad is. It can only remove the heat that

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reaches the other side of the motherboard. Think about it like this.

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It doesn't matter how many lanes your highway is if everyone has to file

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through the same single lane bottleneck, support public transit. This cooler can

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only pull away as much heat as it's being given. But once you pull all of

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the heat away, you're going to be rate limited by the motherboard. So, it

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doesn't matter how much extra cooling power you put on here, unless you decide to go sub-zero. And if you're going to

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go sub-zero, just put it on the front.

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Don't put it on the back. I'm just going to take the fan out. I wonder if it will

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even like if the cooler will even saturate. Like, that would be a good

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indicator if uh if this thing is actually doing anything. 21.3.

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It's going up very slowly. So, it is

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actually we are transmitting some heat away. But, do you know what's going to make this heat up faster is if I just

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touch it with my hand. Let's compare that to running the front without the fan. So, we're looking at it right now.

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It's sitting at 27°. Now, Reese is going to hit

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Cinebench and we're going to see how quickly this thing heats up. 28 26

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29 30.

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It's like it took us like literally minutes to go up a degree before and

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this is climbing a degrees per second and eventually it will start getting to

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the point where it's probably thermal throttling. This just illustrates how much more important this is than

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whatever we're doing on the back. Keep watching please. We decided to use our

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environmental chamber to have a perfectly controlled temperature for the

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most precise of results. But when we tested in there, every permutation of

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our system performed the exact same. back panel, back fan, back cooler, stock

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cooler, it did not matter. Was all of our preliminary testing wrong? No, it's

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the environmental chamber who was wrong. To maintain temperatures within a tenth

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of a degree, the chamber needs to constantly blow conditioned air. And

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that conditioned air blowing was enough to cool the motherboard on our control

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system, which means that we saw no improvements on our cooled system, and

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that blows. We needed a more realistic air flow scenario. So, we found a spot

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in our office that was roughly equidistant from a bunch of ventilation.

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We set the room temp to a tight 22ish°

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and tried again. And would you look at that? With the custom back plate and a

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fan, we see CPU temps drop 1 to 2°. Heck yeah. And with our cooler mounted to the

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back, we see a further improvement of

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1 or less degrees. It's not nothing, but

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it is almost nothing. Oh, and we've kind of been neglecting to tell you about the

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results that make this whole endeavor look uh even more foolish. When we

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compare CPU temps with our front mounted cooler on its stock mounting hardware

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instead of our custom back blade, it performs better than our back mounted

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cooler setup. So, uh, all the haters at the start of the video who said this

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won't work, shut up. It does work. It just works poorly. Maybe you could get

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better performance out of a more precise custom mounting mechanism, but why

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bother when you can just do this?

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get 20% off your first subscription. Thanks for watching. What do you think?

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Was there something that we missed? Something that you could have done differently? Let us know in the

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comments. And if you liked this video, why don't you watch a cooling solution that did work, like our AC cooler.